The Funeral I Never Got to Speak At

I sat in the back row and said nothing — because everything I wanted to say started with "I should have."

I should have called. I should have answered the phone that last time instead of letting it ring. I should have said the hard thing to his face instead of saying the easy thing behind his back. I should have been there. And now the only thing left to say is goodbye, and goodbye doesn't fix a single one of those should-haves.

That's what addiction does to the people around the addict. It doesn't just take the person using — it hands everybody who loved them a lifetime membership to the regret club. You replay the last conversation. You wonder if one more try would have been the one. You carry a weight that was never yours to carry, and you carry it forever.

If you're still here — if you're the one using, reading this with the phone in your hand — understand something: the people who love you are already grieving you while you're alive. Every missed call is a rehearsal for a funeral. You have the power to cancel that rehearsal. Nobody else does.

And if you're the one who sat in that back row — the mother, the brother, the best friend — hear me: it wasn't your fault. You didn't fail them. Addiction is the killer, not you. You loved them through it until the end, and that love was real even when it wasn't enough. It was never supposed to be enough. It was just supposed to be love.

That's why we keep a candle lit, 24-7, 365. Because the ones we lost deserve more than our silence. They deserve their names said out loud. They deserve a place where their memory lives on instead of fading into a back-row regret.

Don't let your tribute be silence. Say their name. Tell their story. Leave a tribute at the vigil — and let the world know who they were, not just how they died.